The food and beverage sector is dealing with more product recalls and compliance issues than ever before. The FDA regulates most of the industry and issues civil and criminal penalties to food and beverage companies that don’t comply with ever-increasing legislation concerning product safety. However, many companies are unaware of their responsibilities, especially product recall management.

FDA strictly enforces penalties in the food and beverage sector, so manufacturers and retailers need effective product recall management strategies. But implementing these strategies proves difficult for companies like yours because of the following issues.

#1. FSMA Confuses Food and Beverage Companies

At the turn of the century, food and beverage companies found it easier to manage product safety than today. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), introduced in 2011, changed everything, introducing a raft of new laws that shifted the responsibilities of food and beverage safety from consumers to manufacturers and retailers.

FSMA requires you to take a proactive, risk-based approached to food and beverage safety, and it gives the FDA sweeping powers to enforce mandates that govern the industry. These powers include the ability to issue higher and more frequent civil and criminal penalties to companies that don’t respond to product recall safety notices.

FSMA might confuse you because it can be a struggle to know what to do when a safety notice concerns a food or beverage product you manufacture or sell. The FDA requires you to respond to a relevant safety notice swiftly, for example. Or take action to protect consumers and public health. This action might include removing dangerous products from production lines or ingredients from supply chains. Or the FDA might require you to communicate with suppliers or logistics providers.

The FDA has attempted to make product safety management easier with online tools such as this Food Safety Plan Builder. However, the recall management of product safety remains complicated. The agency posts product recall notices on its website, but many companies don’t have the time or resources to check the site regularly. These companies might then receive fines for not responding to a relevant notice.

Food and beverage companies like yours need product recall management strategies that simplify FSMA and the safety notices that pertain to this legislation.

Recommended reading: Common FDA Recall Terms and Definitions

#2. The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Further Complicated Product Recalls and Compliance Issues

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a far-reaching impact on the entire food and beverage sector, including the way companies manage product recalls and safety notices:

  • Because of social distancing, some companies have fewer employees managing recalls in the workplace.
  • When responding to a recall, some companies can no longer travel to production plants, manufacturing facilities, logistic providers, and other partners, making it difficult to resolve recall scenarios.
  • Companies financially affected by the pandemic have fewer resources to deal with product recalls.

These challenges might affect your company. However, the FDA still expects you to respond to all safety notices that affect your food and beverage products, and failing to do so could cause penalties of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although the FDA suspended in-person routine inspections of manufacturing facilities at the start of the pandemic, the agency hasn’t become more lenient about product safety issues over the last year.

Recommended Reading: How to Conduct a Mock Food and Beverage Recall

#3. Food and Beverage Companies Focus All Their Efforts on Pleasing the FDA

As previously mentioned, the FDA governs the vast majority of the food and beverage sector. But other federal and local agencies also mandate food and beverage product safety, and many companies overlook these authorities.

Take the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), for example. This agency has an inspection service called the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) that implements penalties for food and beverage safety non-compliance, and its penalties are just as severe as those issued by the FDA. Still, many companies focus all their energies on the FDA. Others are completely unaware that the USDA event governs their industry.

USDA rules affect some food and beverage companies more than others. Companies that deal with meat, poultry, and eggs, for example, should know their obligations when manufacturing and labeling these food products. Otherwise, they could face penalties for non-compliance. Companies that exist in this space should also pay attention to USDA-issued safety notices, market withdrawals, public health alerts, and other recall responsibilities.

As you can see, recall planning and management in the food and beverage sector concerns more than just the FDA.

Recommended reading: Food and Beverage Management Software Service

What’s the Solution to Food and Beverage Product Recalls and Compliance Issues?

Mock Recalls features an elite recall planning and training team with RQA that includes a robust recall simulation assessment and execution solution. We are purely focused on protecting your product investment by working with you to create a new recall plan or analyze your current recall plan and then put it through a mock recall or recall simulation test to insure you are prepared for a possible product recall. We use our on-demand SaaS based recall management platform powered by TRIEVR Recall Management that eliminates common mistakes manually conducting recalls, by automating the most tedious steps of a product recall. It is a simple to use platform that just focuses on handling product recalls quickly and efficiently. Through our mock recall training using our dedicated recall platform, companies can improve the recall process, increase response rates, and document and communicate with all stakeholders.

Our program can analyze your company’s readiness in many of the typical elements of the recall process including:

  • Initiation, investigation, and communication process
  • Recall working team and decision team composition and dynamics
  • Team roles and responsibilities
  • Process flow and lot traceability
  • And retrieval capability and effectiveness checks

Our recall simulation program is conducted as an escalating model using real product facts and potential issues, with multiple inputs such as consumer complaints, social media, FDA/USDA/local health department and law enforcement. Conducting a recall simulation will also allow the recall team and all involved personnel to become familiar with their responsibilities throughout the recall procedure. This gives them time to effectively communicate any concerns about the plan while the company isn’t dealing with the pressure of an actual recall.

Food and beverage companies across the United States can hire Mock Recalls for better product recall readiness.

Food and beverage manufacturers and retailers like yours need to be aware of product recall responsibilities and digitize all responses and strategies. The FDA, USDA, and other federal and state agencies issue penalties for product recall management non-compliance. These penalties could cripple your entire organization. Using the proper mock recall planning and testing program like Mock Recalls offers streamlines food and beverage safety and solves problematic product recalls and compliance issues.

Looking to test your product recall readiness across your organization? MockRecalls will help create and/or test your recall program. Click here to learn more or call us!